The Current Situation

Alright here's the scoop. I've been doing a terrible job keeping up with this blog. No, it's true. And really, I feel bad. But, hakuna matata, go drink a bowl of milk, hasta la vista. Here is what I am going to do: I am going to give you an account of what is happening right meow, then, recount what has been happening and what I have been learning about the lab for the past month.

Right now I have begun working with babies and researching what will be my assignment with Dr. Campos. We are finally getting babies through the new study that the lab is doing examining the differences between crawling and walking infants in a spatial cognitive task, the moving room. The moving room is a big box with one open side where the infant can get into. Inside the box is a pressure sensitive chair and a small t.v. screen in the front. The t.v. screen is in place to keep the focus of the infant forward for the movement of the box. As the baby sits in the box, the experimenters, including myself now, will move the walls of the box, giving the baby the perception that they are moving through space. This can be done both by moving all the walls of the box, or, by just moving the side walls. Inside the box the baby sees the patterned walls moving giving them the visual perception of movement. The pressure sensitive chair records whether or not the infant responds to this movement with a postural sway. This measurement is important because it provides valuable information about what the infant may be attending to in their visual field; whether or not they are reacting to radial optic flow (referring to the movement of the front wall alone), lamellar optic flow (the type of flow provided by isolating the side walls to move), or global optic flow (the movement of the entire room). This is important in light of a giant in the field of perceptual psychology James Gibson's idea that humans do not perceive the world around them as a series of singularly-correlated images to neural reaction, but as a constantly moving field never consisting of static objects. This is why examining the way that infants react to different types of optic flow, or movement in their field of vision, is important; it helps bring to light how different dynamic portions of our vision are being utilized. Examining the development of these spatial skills is thus important for providing a better understanding of how humans perceive the world around them. This is a big topic and I will write on it more later.

As for the assignment that will hopefully be working extensively on with Professor Campos, it is the creation of a new theory of development for the 'Joint-Attention'. After having a long talk with Dr. Campos about the unfortunate lull in baby supplies this summer, he told me that if I was going to be doing a written assignment for him, I might as well try to do something that would be extremely important for the lab (excellent!). What needs to be figured out, he said, was a developmental model for how babies, and why babies, begin to share attention with other people, recognizing others as cognitive, decision-making objects. This model, he said, has not been satisfying represented referring to existing theories of its development as, "confusing people, not advancing knowledge in the field." My task, then, would be to review the published literature on Joint-Attention development and from it construct a new theory about the nature of its development. Dr. Campos said that although this work will not have the possibility of being completed this summer, he would spend a lot of time working on it with me, not only through the summer, but into the next school year. Also, because of the importance and difficulty of this work, although it is entirely unheard of for an undergraduate to publish a review, he said that this would be potentially publishable work. Wow.

So there it is. A huge task. Exactly what I wanted. I am now in the process of reading what Dr. Campos recommended I begin my research with, an article on joint-attention. Unfortunately, I did not realize when he said article, he actually meant book. Sad day, but 100 pages down, 100 to go, by the time I'm done I'll be ready to tackle as much of the literature as I can get my hands on.

In future blogs I will not only explain the review project I am working on, but will also talk about the new study that I am working on as a research assistant (dealing with the crawling-walking transition), and general work done by the lab. I have spent the last month learning everything I could about the developmental perspective and work accomplished by Dr. Campos's lab, and I will try to share it with you, … blog. Hopefully the last month of work has prepared me to figure out this joint attention problem. In my next blog I will explain the problem of joint attention more thoroughly.

Hasta la vista!